Are you ready for Cyber Week 2023?

A look back at the 2022 holiday season

The festive season is always crucial for eCommerce retailers. Emerging from the pandemic but heading into a cost of living crisis, businesses and consumers have faced uncertainty and challenges. The experiences of managing their finances during the pandemic prepared people for the surge in inflation, driven by spectacular increases in energy prices. Following a year filled with challenges, the 2022 season seemed even more crucial than usual, with everyone hopeful for a success. Despite market unpredictability, Black Friday 2022 has been widely reported as the most successful Cyber Week ever in terms of monetary spend.

Economists believe that the experience of budgeting and managing personal finances through the pandemic helped fuel resilience during the cost of living crisis, with consumers better able to manage the surge in inflation. Adobe reports that online sales totalled over $211.7bn across Cyber Week¹. – one fifth of all spend in November and December combined. Black Friday online spend was up 2.3% against 2021, and Cyber Monday spend up 5.8%.

The future of commerce is hybrid

Indications are that spending in the US helped to stabilise headwinds in the UK and Europe, where the impact of the cost-of-living crisis has been felt keenly by consumers. With uncertainty going into the period about whether consumer spending would hold up, businesses deployed strategies to help stabilise and boost performance with active targeting of customers to capitalise on the period:

• According to the most recent Adobe Analytics data, companies offering Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) companies saw a 68% increase² in online sales during Cyber Week
• Salesforce reported 49bn messages sent in total over the period³, up 20% on 2021
• Adobe notes discounts within the range of 8% to 34%

With the upsurge of omnichannel commerce, consumers have more holiday season shopping options than ever before. According to Salesforce, traffic referrals from social media hit an all-time high this holiday, driving 12% of all mobile traffic. Click & collect peaked at 35%⁴ of all orders on the Friday before Christmas, up from an average of 20% and more consumers used ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ on Black Friday. Omnichannel retail is expanding in a variety of ways, crossing digital and physical boundaries with consumers demanding a consistent, frictionless experience across channels alongside personalised interactions.

• Online purchase, in-store pick up
• In-store purchase, home delivery
• Online purchase, in-store return

Predictions and overall Results

Every year, enthusiastic shoppers anticipate the annual Cyber Week shopping event and the opportunities it can offer to purchase products at a reduced price. According to a Statista survey in 2022, 43 percent of global consumers⁵ on average were thinking about taking advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales when shopping for the holiday season. Consumer spending has held up despite economic challenges. It is no surprise to see these broad market trends reflected in the numbers of validation requests processed by EDQ over the Cyber Week period.

Volumes have grown across all three platforms, with 8m addresses validated on Black Friday vs 7.7m in 2021, 2.3m emails validated vs 2.1m in 2021 and 311k phone numbers validated vs 260k in 2021.

8m

addresses validated on Black Friday vs 7.7m in 2021

2.3m

emails validated vs 2.1m in 2021

311k

phone numbers validated vs 260k in 2021

UK & Ireland performance

In the UK alone there were 26m address validation requests over Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Boxing Day. UK consumers driving 30% of all Black Friday volume (11.6m), 26% of Cyber Monday volume (9.7m) and 30% of Boxing Day volume (4.8m).

30%

of all Black Friday volume (11.6m)

26%

of Cyber Monday volume (9.7m)

30%

of Boxing Day volume (4.8m)

Preparing for Cyber Week 2023

As the market stabilises and cautious optimism begins to return to consumers and businesses, now is the right time to begin thinking about and preparing for Cyber Week 2023.

With digitalisation now a firmly established consumer expectation, user experience and trust are more important than ever to win customer favour and spend.

Offering customers a stand out user experience by personalising the shopping journey and removing friction is one way to capitalise on the opportunity offered by Cyber Week. User experience trends observed by our retail expert(s) include:

• Development of omnichannel retail strategies that use the entire retail estate to provide seamless, consistent customer engagement
• Prioritisation of POS systems that actively support omnichannel initiatives such as click-and-collect
• Growing social media integration into cross-channel campaigns that reinforce every aspect of the customer experience, allowing purchases to be made anywhere, any time
• Streamlining and integration of sales and payment processes across all online and offline channels

Consistent across all of these trends is contact data. Without quality data being collected through and then used to develop and reinforce the user experience, retailers cannot execute successfully against their customer experience ambitions and stand to miss out during this year’s Cyber Week. Clean and accurate contact data delivers across multiple use cases, from better targeting to improved conversion, reduced cart abandonment through to increased delivery success.